Weekly Status Report, W50/2007

Another week crammed with private life has passed, still I managed to do quite a bit of work as well, here's a short summary of work I did in SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related areas in week 50/2007 (December 10 - 16):

• Artwork:
  For the work being done on making the browser toolbars customizable, I spent some more time on transparent Modern toolbar icons so that users of that secondary theme we ship can also use that feature well enough when it's implemented.
  While on that topic, I remembered the long-standing bug of the "M" icon in Modern's component bar and worked on replacing it with a globe as the symbol for the browser.
• Certificate Error Page:
  SeaMonkey 2, as every Gecko 1.9 browser, will show an error page instead of warning dialogs on SSL certificate problems. Users can add security exceptions for specific certificates, but we want to keep that a solution that nobody should ever just click through, so security gets improved. Still, clicking through prefs, opening a dialog from there, entering the domain name again manually, display that certificate's problems and then add the exception is probably too complicated, even for advanced users - so we added a button to open that dialog with the domain prefilled to the error page. This still needs you to go through various clicks on different places on the error page and the dialog, but saves a complicated search for the dialog or re-typing the domain, which we hope to be a good compromise between tight security and user-friendliness.
  Interestingly, I started into that bug, copying a blob of JS code I didn't understand from Firefox - after reviews I had not only changed that code significantly, I even understand what it's doing, why it's working as it should and what's different from how Firefox does it (we also discovered at least two bugs related to the Firefox implementation). Thanks to Neil and jag for pointing out all that stuff - those guys are the living proof for how reviews improve open source code quality.
• SeaMonkey Project Organization:
  I tried to get the discussion in the Council going again for our internal restructuring, this seems to be getting along nicely now.
  I also tried to define and get us to discuss criteria for a SeaMonkey 2 Alpha, we seem to be mostly in agreement here, I'll post those soon.
  And the SeaMonkey blog now got a more SeaMonkey-style design and is linked on the SeaMonkey website on the community page and a pointer on the development page.
• Small Remarks:
  I drove a patch for using "plugin" as consistent spelling (many places still had "plug-in") through the needed reviews and approvals - thanks to Giacomo for the patch and Reed for landing it.
  To track getting the automatic update system working in SeaMonkey trunk, I filed a SeaMonkey AUS2 bug - we want to have this working by Alpha in the sense that upgrading from SeaMonkey 2 Alpha to later development and stable releases will work through that service.
  And sometimes fun ideas can lead to interesting bug reports: My girlfriend wondered if she can have spellcheck do pink underlines in her Firefox, and I found out that red is hardcoded there, which might be a problem in themes that give textboxes a red tone.
• Source L10n:
  Further progress in the area of ChatZilla and venkman localization is currently blocked by one of the reviews in Axel's queue - he's assuring me he's working through his backlog after being back from MV meetings and a great FOSS.in conference. Read his report while waiting on that review
• German L10n:
  German trunk is in good shape, we usually don't lag much behind en-US and have green trees now most of the time.
• Various Discussions:
  Mac dmg design, customizable toolbars, listing JS in page info "links" tab, pref pane rework, future directions for address book and mailnews in general, feed discovery and support, mozilla.org projects list, AMO improvement plans, memory management improvements and regressions, etc.

If you are not a core SeaMonkey developer, but would be interested in getting involved with Mozilla/SeaMonkey programming and looking for a relatively easy task, the preference window migration should be something to look into. There's still a good list of panels to be migrated from the legacy pref window to the new preferences window, and there are a few panes that have already been converted, which should make good examples.
Also, people in the #seamonkey IRC channel are surely happy to help you get started with such a contribution.